


Finding Fantastic

by DameRuth



Series: Flowers [41]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, Gratuitous Science, Multi, Polyamory, Polyamory ftw, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:48:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24881824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DameRuth/pseuds/DameRuth
Summary: Ianto, Jack, Rose and the Doctor visit the Moon, and Ianto sets the record straight.[Continuing the Teaspoon imports, originally posted 2009.10.21.]
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones, Tenth Doctor/Jack Harkness/Rose Tyler, Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Series: Flowers [41]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/14017
Kudos: 18





	Finding Fantastic

**Author's Note:**

> Written for RobinC/lindenharp, winner of my Support Stacie auction thread. She requested a followup to ["Free Fall,"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24828232) documenting the promised day trip to the Moon. The Muse got weird and insisted on setting this fic *after* the end of "Untouched By Frost." It also ended up being very fluffy and unapologetically Jack/Ianto, but I think that's partly a delayed reaction to CoE (which, by comparison, makes "Flowers" look like the happiest, fluffiest 'Verse *evar,* angst and all!). Slightly spoilery for the end of "Frost" (or maybe not, since I don't think my regular readers would/will be at all surprised that Ten, Rose and Jack work things out eventually, which is all that one can really gather from this). Thanks to Aibhinn for beta-ing, and catching several potential errors.
> 
> * * *

Rose walked along the wardrobe rack, riffling through the hanging clothes as she went. "Now this is more like it," she said, as she stopped and frowned thoughtfully at a heavy wool jacket. "These are starting to look like what we need, around your size."  
  
Ianto couldn't hold back the question at the tip of his tongue any longer. It was something he'd been itching to ask Rose ever since he'd met her. He blurted it out. "How do you do it?"  
  
"You just think about what you're looking for — nothing too specific — and the TARDIS picks up on that. If you let her, she'll guide you in the right direction," Rose responded, still distracted by her search.  
  
"No, I mean, how do you keep from being overwhelmed? By all this . . ." he gestured around at the elaborate helical conglomeration of coral and metal that made up the ship's multi-level wardrobe area. "By _them_?"  
  
The sidelong look Rose shot him through mascara-dark lashes told Ianto that she understood exactly what he was asking. She considered for a moment, continuing to page through the hangers, but her frown was less for the clothing in front of her and more introspective.  
  
"I guess you just don't _let_ them overwhelm you," she said, speaking slowly, picking her words.  
  
Ianto huffed a small laugh. "Easier said than done," he said.  
  
"Well, yes and no," Rose said, turning her head to look at him straight-on. "They're both bigger than life, yeah, but they're both still . . . well, not 'human,' not with the Doctor in the mix, but people. Blokes. Trousers on one leg at a time and all that. Give 'em half a chance and they'll run away with you, but if you put your foot down and remind them they don't know everything, they listen. Eventually." Her smile was wry, and Ianto had to smile back. "They need it sometimes. You've got a good start on that with Jack, from what I've seen," she added.  
  
"Yes, well, fetishes aside, Jack doesn't really know his way around an office. He needs a bit of prompting to keep things on track."  
  
"There you are, that's all there is to it," Rose told him, face lighting up with one of her dazzling grins. Her hand stopped suddenly, closing over a particular hanger. She cocked her head and freed her prize, a heavy anorak, from the long row of garments. "And there you are again. Try that on for size."  
  
He did; the fit was perfect, but he had to take it off again quickly, since he began overheating almost immediately. Rose nodded with satisfaction. "Good. You'll want that kind of warmth outside. The TARDIS'll be doing her best" — she patted the garment rack absently, and Ianto could swear he heard an answering catch in the ship's background hum — "but she'll be trying to heat a lot of air, and it's cold out there."  
  
"Coldest place in the solar system, they're saying in the news — down at the south pole, at least," Ianto told her, almost by reflex.  
  
Rose's dark eyebrows went up. "Really? Would've thought Pluto would win. Now _there's_ a chilly spot." She sounded like she was speaking from experience. "C'mon, let's get back upstairs. They're probably about done by now." Ianto took the anorak — and the heavy, insulated boots they'd also found — and followed.  
  
On the way back to the control room, they made one more detour: to a quite prosaic broom closet loaded with janitorial supplies. Rose pulled out a couple of brooms. "We'll have to sweep up after we're done," she said, almost apologetic. "It's a pain, but we can't go leaving footprints scattered everywhere for people to find later."  
  
Ianto nodded, approving. "That's a perfectly reasonable precaution," he said, and she smiled at him again, relieved. They continued on to the control room. Rose casually propped the brooms against the control panel. Through the open TARDIS doors, Ianto could hear approaching voices: the Doctor and Jack, laughing and joking with one another. A moment later, both of them stepped back into the ship, knocking dust off their boots on the way. They were wearing pressure suits -- of two noticeably different styles, probably from different eras -- but their heads were bare, helmets casually tucked under their arms.  
  
"Dome's up," Jack announced, setting his helmet on the jump seat so he could begin unfastening the seals on his suit. "And the TARDIS has the air up to pressure."  
  
"Didn't think even you two would be wandering around out there with no helmets on, otherwise," Rose told him with clear affection, teasing.  
  
Jack, shucking off his gloves, chuckled. "True. We can both _survive_ a vacuum, but it's no fun."  
  
"We'll just give it a moment or two more to warm up a bit," the Doctor chimed in, stripping out of his own pressure suit. Underneath, he was wearing his familiar pinstripes; Ianto couldn't help but be amused by that.  
  
"Ah, good — found something suitable to wear?" The Doctor nodded at the anorak folded over Ianto's arm. "Because when I say _warm_ it's a relative term, as in 'warmer than one hundred twenty degrees Kelvin,' which is the ambient temperature out there." Ianto did the conversion in his head. A good hundred and eighty degrees Celsius below room temperature; not as frigid as the Moon's famous south pole, but respectably nippy by anyone's standards.  
  
"Rose thinks it'll work," Ianto said.  
  
"Well, if _Rose_ thinks so," the Doctor said, as if that was the final word on the matter. He draped his limp, empty pressure suit over the safety railing and added, "She's an old Moon hand, Rose." He glanced over his shoulder to smile at her with undisguised warmth. Rose smiled back at the Doctor with the pure sweetness of someone very much in love. The exchange made Ianto believe the whole crossing-Universes story in a way he hadn't before. Jack was right. There was something very . . . absolute about Rose and the Doctor together.  
  
The moment passed, and Rose turned to Ianto. "Let's get dressed," she said, her eyes bright with anticipation. She was already wearing boots, and her heavy coat was draped over the safety railing next to Ianto's regular winter coat, which had been laughingly dismissed by the others as inadequate for the outing.  
  
Ianto obediently switched out shoes for boots and shrugged on the anorak, then added a pair of thick wool gloves. Jack and the Doctor were slipping into their respective long coats — no special gear for them, the Time Lord and the immortal. Temperature extremes didn't affect them much. It was just the fragile, ordinary humans who needed extra protection.  
  
Rose finished bundling into her coat and mittens, pulling a heavy stocking cap over her peroxide-blonde hair. The Doctor was waiting to offer her his arm, and together they took off down the ramp, leaving Jack and Ianto to follow, everyone gamely supporting the polite fiction that they were merely two separate couples out for a trip together, instead of the far more complicated reality. Ianto knew the others were being scrupulously careful of his feelings, and much as it annoyed him on some levels, he was very grateful for that kindness all the same.  
  
"Ready?" Jack asked, with much the same expectant expression as Rose. Ianto nodded, and they headed for the doors. Just before they rached the threshold, Jack took Ianto's hand, surprising him. Theirs wasn't ordinarily a hand-holding sort of relationship.  
  
Jack noticed Ianto's reaction. "Lower gravity's shock at first," Jack explained, "even if you think you're expecting it. It can be good to have something to hold on to." Being Jack, he managed to put a sly spin on the words that had Ianto rolling his eyes.  
  
"I'll stick to your hand, thanks," he responded dryly, and Jack's leering half-smile broke into a bright, thousand-watt grin.  
  
"Trust me, it's chilly enough out there, not even _I_ am going to suggest any kind of extracurricular activity," Jack reassured him. "Not to mention the regolith gets _every_ where — worse than the beach . . ."  
  
"Sounds unappealing," Ianto agreed, and, trying not to swallow visibly, stepped from the metal grate of the TARDIS's deck onto the surface of the Moon.  
  
The change of gravity hit him immediately, and he would have overbalanced if it hadn't been for his grip on Jack. Jack's hand tightened reassuringly, helping steady him. Fine, pale dust — the regolith — puffed around their feet; it felt like gritty snow and smelled disconcertingly of spent gunpowder, making Ianto think of Torchwood's underground firing range.  
  
After a bit of embarrassing wobbling, he began to get a feel for his new weight, and Jack's grip on his hand eased. "Figured you'd catch on quickly," Jack told him. "You've got good balance."  
  
"If you say so," Ianto said, distracted, finally getting a chance to look around.  
  
It was chilly, no doubt about it, but not as cold as he'd expected from what the others were saying. His breath steamed in the thin, dry, gunpowder-scented air, as did Jack's. But those were things he noticed peripherally; most of his attention was focused, at first, on the sky.  
  
You didn't get sky so velvet-black on Earth, or so immediate in its presence. Atmosphere diluted and distanced the stars. This was the unadulterated night of space, but not confined and framed by the TARDIS doors. _An agoraphobic's nightmare,_ Ianto thought. Above them, close to the zenith, a nearly-full Earth glowed with reflected sunlight; the light it cast gave a soft, blue-green, underwater glow to the pale regolith, far brighter than the full Moon as seen from Earth. They were in the middle of the Moon's near-side night, the sun behind them, but it wasn't dark. Ianto could clearly see their surroundings in the earthlight.  
  
They were in a crater — not a particularly big one, only about two hundred meters across, with walls about eighty meters tall. The TARDIS was parked in the center of the gently sloping bowl of the crater, which was filled with regolith and a few pockmarks of smaller collisions. Up around the rim, Ianto could see the blue "working" lights of the forcefield projectors, tall and stake-like, planted at regular intervals to generate a protective dome capping off the entire crater. Quite the production, really. From what Ianto had gathered, it was more elaborate than what was planned for the future outing involving all of Torchwood; this was a special preview, largely for his benefit. One of the perks of dating the boss, apparently.  
  
Ianto gestured at the projectors, carefully keeping his balance. "You got those up fast." Immediately he realized he'd just left an opening for yet another round of innuendo. One learned to speak carefully around someone like Jack.  
  
Jack shrugged, and for once didn't take the bait. "We each took an armload and split up. With a little practice, you can move at a pretty good clip in conditions like this, even wearing a suit." He sounded so matter-of-fact, Ianto couldn't help but be reminded of the gap between them, all the things that were completely outside his experience but commonplace to Jack.  
  
Movement in his peripheral vision redirected his attention to the floor of the crater. Off in the distance, he could see Rose and the Doctor, moving along in an easy, bouncing lockstep, their hands clasped. They picked up speed, sending up puffs of regolith with each step, until they both kicked off together in an impressive leap that turned into a graceful spiral as they spun around the common center of their clasped hands, the Doctor's coattails flaring dramatically. When they touched down again they broke apart, taking a long, spinning leap away from one another, then back, catching hands again . . .  
  
The motion was so symmetrical and cadenced, Ianto realized what he had to be seeing. "Are they . . . dancing?" he asked Jack.  
  
"Those two are _always_ dancing," Jack said with affection. "But yes — that's twenty-seventh century low-gee ballroom. I could teach you, if you like."  
  
It looked graceful and effortless, but Ianto knew that probably meant it was, in actuality, very difficult. He was torn between a youthful impulse to see what his body could do in this new environment and a desire to maintain the careful shell of personal dignity he'd spent so long building up.  
  
Just then, Rose and the Doctor landed badly from another mutual leap and they went down together with an impressive puff of regolith. They bounced up again immediately, for a quick hug and dusting-off before they started dancing again. Ianto could imagine their shared laughter, even though he was too far away to hear it.  
  
He shook his head ruefully. "It looks like fun, but I think I'd better stick to basic locomotion for now." He had to admit, he was glad to have the opportunity to practice this in private, before the rest of the Torchwood team came along for the ride. Being able to keep his balance while Owen went face-down was an especially attractive prospect.  
  
"Fair enough," Jack said, "if a little boring." He winked to take the sting out of it and tugged on Ianto's hand, and together they took a several slow, slightly bouncy steps forward. Along the way, Ianto felt the faint, cobweb-brushing sensation of passing through a semi-permeable forcefield — and that was when the cold hit him. They'd just moved beyond the confines of the TARDIS's own intrinsic protective field, he realized. The air wasn't cold enough for instant frostbite, but it was definitely colder than Cardiff's winters. He stopped for a minute, acclimating, and Jack paused with him.  
  
"Now I see why you said I needed a better coat," he told Jack.  
  
"Told you," Jack said, grinning. "Anyway, where to next? Moving's the best way to keep warm. We could walk to the edge of the crater and climb up so you can look around — the forcefield has enough headspace around the edge for that. There's a nice view from there; you can see mountains off in the distance." Despite the suggestion he didn't seem to be in any hurry to move, letting Ianto set the pace as his comfort levels allowed.  
  
"The Mountains of the Moon," Ianto murmured. "I don't think we'd run into Richard Burton there, though."  
  
Jack laughed. "Speaking of exploring, there's a lot of worthwhile scenery in the solar system. We should take you on the tour. Olympus Mons isn't much — it's just too damn big to register when you're actually standing on it — but the Valles Marineris is impressive as hell; might be fun to go there now, before there're tourists everywhere. Then there's Jupiter and the rings of Saturn — the pictures the probes have been sending back don't even _begin_ to do them justice."  
  
"Sounds nice," Ianto admitted, looking towards the stars again, letting his thoughts expand, imagining everything just out of reach (or maybe not), the things no human eye had (yet) seen before . . . His first taste of wanderlust was sharp and clear, with a surprising weight of longing behind it.  
  
"Your gift for understatement never fails to amaze me," Jack said, dryly but without a particularly sharp edge. "It's better than 'nice.' It's _fantastic._ " He smiled, and it was a complex, reminiscent expression. "You'll really learn to appreciate that word, if you decide to do any more traveling with the Doctor." He turned to look at the Time Lord as he spoke, gazing off in the distance where Rose and the Doctor were still engaged in their graceful, ethereal dance. There was something bordering on worship in his tone and face.  
  
Ianto couldn't help it; he laughed with affectionate exasperation. _He thinks it's all about the Doctor, he always has . . ._ Jack turned to blink at him, and Ianto, remembering what Rose had said, told him flat out, "For someone who likes to pretend he knows everything, you really are thick sometimes."  
  
Jack lifted his chin in that questioning, half defensive way he did when he wasn't quite getting something.  
  
"You still haven't worked it out, have you?" Ianto continued, shaking his head.  
  
Jack's eyebrows quirked up slightly, inviting him to clarify.  
  
"I'm not traveling with _him_ ," Ianto said, tilting his head in the Doctor's direction. "I'm traveling with _you_."  
  
Watching Jack's face as those words sank in was gratifying. So was the abrupt snog-and-clinch he was swept up in immediately afterwards. Jack was warm–very warm — and a standing-still activity was very much Ianto's speed at the moment. He had a feeling he'd be taking at least a few spills, and wasn't looking forward to the prospect of getting regolith out of his clothes back home. But he'd worry about that later.  
  
Right at the moment, he was too busy appreciating something fantastic.  
  
_A/N again - Proving yet again that research can actually be beneficial to the writing process, as well as covering the author's backside, while I checking out[the Wikipedia article on the moon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon) I ran across this beautifully evocative line, "Astronauts have reported that the dust from the surface felt like snow and smelled like spent gunpowder," and said, "OMG, I am **so** stealing that!!" It's even supported by [a NASA article.](http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/30jan_smellofmoondust.htm) Yes, kids, there's poetry in them thar hard skience facts.  
  
While I can't say this is a thoroughly researched piece of SF, I did look up things like the Moon's nightside temperature (Ianto, BTW, is citing [this recent announcement](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17810-moon-is-coldest-known-place-in-the-solar-system.html) about the shocking cold to be found at the Moon's south pole), crater forms and relative proportions, etc. FWIW, when Jack implies conditions on the Moon's surface are a "vacuum," he's incorrect (probably knowingly so, in his case), since the Moon does have the tiniest little bit of atmosphere . . . but it's **so** little as to make no never mind and I felt comfortable having Jack "round down" as it were.  
  
Finally, I took a page from canon that says Jack is relatively temperature-impervious (the Doctor's comment that Jack might not freeze in the cold at the end of Time, in "Utopia,") and the way that he's sometimes simply invulnerable to environmental things like radiation (ditto source). Given how completely plot-dependent the terms of Jack's immortality are in canon, it's really an author's call on how to interpret such things . . .  
  
Tl;dr, I'm a geek, so there. ;) _  


* * *

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